Caiman Pantano
by Robespierre Cincinnati
Summary: Tony Diaz was a civilian who survived a siege at Caiman Pantano, Florida.


Caiman Pantano

This piece is in the same interview format that World War Z is. The town of Caiman Pantano, Florida is fictitious.

**Key West, Florida**

**(This area of the United States was quickly overrun by zombies do to its small size. Now the island has become a very secure **

**location, fortified on all sides and filled with many stilted homes. I am sitting across from Tony Diaz, a Cuban American who **

**survived the entire war from the civilian fortress of Caiman Pantano. We sit on the deck of his stilt house, looking out at the Caribbean. **

Where do you want me to begin?

**Wherever you want.**

I guess I'll start before the Great Panic. I was 26, and had been raised in America my whole life. My father was a refugee from Cuba,

and my mother was a gringo. We lived in Caiman Pantano, and there we stayed. I paid attention to the African rabies outbreak, but

when Phalanx came out I put my trust in American drugs and stopped worrying.

(shakes his head)

Dios, I hate Scott. Who knows how many died because they thought they were safe? I digress. I was not worried about the rabies, in till the infection spread to Miami. You know, Miami was highly populated and had so many tourists and refugees. The city quickly fell into chaos, and Zack swarmed out of that accursed place. I first learned about the zombies when they reached Cape Coral. I had an uncle there, and he called me from his home. I don't know how, but his phone call got to me. He told me how they were really the living dead, and he had learned enough about them, unfortunately not how to kill them but at least how to stop them from breaking into my home, that I was prepared.

(tears come to his eyes)

He didn't make it. He lived in a normal house, and it was overrun soon. He... I'm glad someone else took him out.

**You were prepared?**

I owned a stilt home. Caiman Pantano was a bright open town. Many of the houses were stilted. I bought one after Hurricane Katrina. I had a silenced, laser-sighted rifle, for killing gators, and a machete for slashing plants if I went into the swamps. I never kept much food, but as soon as I received that call I took three months worth of food up there. That was all I could store. I talked to all the other citizens. We were all terrified... Florida was in chaos, you know... so they listened. We made ladders that could extend from house to house, so we had connected homes. The town had a desalinizer bringing water to every house, so we used it for water. We set up rooftop gardens, and blocked off a large football stadium. The stadium became our farm, and we stretched the overhead roads to there. We ate our perishables first, and then turned to dried food. We raided the gun stores and armed ourselves with rifles and machetes. We set up a radio system. Then we waited.

**When did the zombies come?**

Four hours after we finished preparations. We had three days to do this before Zack just wandered in. We got all of southern Florida headed our way and to Tallahassee and Valdosta, so there were so many... We raised our ladders as soon as we heard the first moan. Only two G's saw us. We had put up shutters on the windows, and the passes between our houses were walled in so we could walk to our neighbors, the stadium farm, and the desalinizer without being seen. That huge swarm just passed by. Those two G's, though, that saw us, they stopped and scratched on our stilts but couldn't get us in till everybody else was gone. The owner of that house, after the first swarm passed, just threw a Molotov at them.

**The town must have caught on fire!**

No, no! The stilt houses, or most of them, were metal. The Molotov eventually burned them down. That was three weeks into our isolation. We kept on living like that, living off the farm. Then the second swarm came. There were 700 of us living in the stilt houses, and the swarm had 100. We took many shots at them, but our rifles, of course, would not kill them. Finally, a teenager in one house fell out. He landed next to a zombie, so he put the rifle up against the G's temple and shot him. The little malvados crumpled to the ground, and we realized how to kill them. We weren't good shots yet, but our force defeated the swarm in eight hours. Four days later a third swarm of 70 came in. We didn't shoot them all down: we took twenty of them, sowed their mouths shut, tied their hands behind their back, and kept them for research. We stored them in an office building that we had secured. It was so easy, surviving. We were living in our stilt houses, gunning down Zack as they came wandering in and eating our produce. We even had electricity! In my down time, I could listen to music on my iPod and watch television, while they still broadcasted!

**You had electricity?**

We had everything. We were self-sufficient.

**Was it fossil fuels, solar, hydroelectric....**

**(grins)**

Zack-powered. We made a huge hamster wheel, and stuck the zombies on it to try to power it. Not much, but it was a small source. We had one man act as bait. The zombies never fell off the wheel or reached him, but he would get their attention. The wheel was actually an old windmill. We grew to have 500 zombies working our turbines. The wheels had hubcap-like things on the sides, so Zack could never fall out of them in a strong wind or hurricanes. This was all during the Great Panic. We lived comfortably.

**What happened when the Redeker Plan was adopted?**

We continued our life. We had a six-month period when there were no zombies, save the occasional few, so during that time we built a small fleet of boats to sail around trading. We called it the Pantano Treasure Fleet. The young, like me, didn't appreciate America as much as our elders did and we started to consider ourselves an individual nation. We elected a president of Pantano, Louis Johnson, and started looking towards luxuries. We even built new stilt homes. When he heard about Redeker, over the radio, we just shrugged and continued on shucking our corn and building houses. We had finally begun to run low on ammunition, so we started making our own bullets and made alcohol for our Molotovs.

**You said that only some of the citizens went up to the stilt houses. What happened to the rest?****  
**

**(he starts to say something but chokes up)**

They suffered the consequences. Caiman Pantano had a population of 6,000. 700 went to the stilts. Around 4,800 died, most of which were infected.

**So you were at peace for a while. How did you expand?**

We built stuff. We started making farms out in the open, walling them in so that our farmers wouldn't get eaten by Zack. The Treasure Fleet brought back all sorts of goodies. Our outlook on life was so positive that some people say that, even without Roy Eliot, we had no ADS. A lot of women were pregnant, so we were having a largely growing population. We had a new generation raised before our war, Pantano's war, had ended. We didn't get supplies like the other survivors did, but we were living well.

**Why not go to Cuba?**

**(he glares at me)**

Do you remember the stories of Castro's presidency? The Cuban Coast Guard shot at my father when he escaped to Florida before the war. He took a round in the lung!

**I understand, I understand, but Cuba was becoming a thriving democracy.**

We were fine on our own. We didn't need America, and we certainly didn't need Cuba! Viva Pantano!

**(I look at him in surprise. He returns the look)**

I'm sorry, I love my country and I realize the validity of your argument, I just became a large patriot for the Republic of Pantano, as we called it. We were comfortable in our hometown, and if we had gone to Cuba we would have just been a bunch of Nortecubanos and gringos working for the new middle class. We were satisfied with our status as kings of the stilt-homes.

**What happened when the American Army appeared?**

We welcomed them. The American soldiers were low on supplies, and we actually gave help to them. We kept our position as an independent nation, though. They didn't mind; they just marched on to the east coast. The Americans fought a battle against Zack near our town. We saw 200, the strength of their vanguard, defeat 10,000 zombies shuffling past us. The Americans had 30 casualties.

(he smiles, with pride on his face)

They were our heroes. They inspired us to go on the offensive: we had the occasional swarms even after the Great Panic, but for the first time we went marching out wearing our variation of Battle Dress Uniforms and carrying our rifles over our shoulders. We killed up to 30,000 zombies during our offensive. I was with the offensive army. We didn't even have to use American tactics: we used what we had learned ourselves. And the refugees: so many survivors, normal people, not quislings and ferals, had been scattered around. We took them in and they saturated into our town. On VA Day the American government actually negotiated with us. We rejoined the USA. Many of us moved, just because of a feeling that we had to go elsewhere after being cooped up for so long. You know how many casualties we had? 47. Six were illness, and the other 41 were old age. We didn't lose a single man to Zack. My parents and my sister, my only immediate family, made it through.

**Why do you live here now?****  
**

I needed to get away. I visited my uncle's house and....

**(he starts crying)**

I said thank you. Thank you for warning me. We survived thanks to him. We thrived. Before I left Caiman Pantano I had former President Johnson declare him a national (or, technically, local) hero. The true savior of our town. Back to your question. I went on and had this house built. It is designed to be zombie-proof, be capable of housing a farm large enough to support 20 people, and look pretty. So my family and I settled down here. During the War I had married another Nortecubano and had two kids. Now we live here.

That is all I have to say. We prepared. We fought. We conquered. That is our motto in Pantano: "Nesotros preparado, nesotros peleado, nesotros conquistado." Do you want to stay a little while longer?

**No thank you, I have to leave for another interview. Thank you for your time and hospitality.**

I'll take you down. Remember: the zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

**(Tony Diaz is one 400 of the "Pantano Army". Caiman Pantano, and the citizens who lived in the "Fortress", as the stilt homes are called, is now one of the most famous examples of civilians building a nearly undefeatable defense)**

That is the end of this interview. I hope you liked it, and I apologize for any language mistakes I made: I used Latin American Spanish instead of Cuban, if there is a difference in the two.


End file.
